Letter to a State School Board member...

Thanks Dixie ~

I'll take a look at them.  I'm certain that the great things being done can be done without having the common core standards.  Great teachers will always find creative ways to teach and help students excel.

I've never thought that the standards were all bad, because I believe good exists in everything, but as I began researching the privatization and federal over reach far exceed any benefit they have.  They could be perfect standards, which they are far from, and I still could not support them due to the loss of freedom and control.

As I've urged others to do, you must study the entire education reform landscape to see what we see.  I've never said this is entirely about the standards.  You must thoroughly examine the RTTT application (I know we didn't win but we still are moving forward with the changes we agreed to make), the NCLB waiver and all the controls in there, the SLDS, the SIG, the Master Teacher program, the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund, the CTE transformation, the call for a German Model of education, and many more.  Once you thoroughly study this out you'll be able to see how they all fit together to transform education in America.  While the current education system needs a lot of help, everyone needs to look at this overall picture and decide if that is the America they'd like to see.  Is this how you want your children taught?  There is no empirical evidence proving their success.  I do not want my children experimented on.  You must agree there are problems or you would never have decided to home-school your grandchildren.

I believe we need to be educating our children with a classical education where they are learning to become great thinkers.  I believe by learning how to work hard they will be able to succeed in life.  I do not believe education should be used by businesses to create "good workers" to fill jobs and I believe in Capitalism!  Businesses working with certain branches of government, circumventing the representative form of government gives the people no voice is NOT capitalism.  The push towards preparing for careers is turning us into the second model of creating workers and not thinkers.

We may never agree and that is fine but I will continue to teach others about the research I've found so that they too can decide for themselves.  I'm certain you can value the importance of looking at both sides of an issue and then studying it out in your mind to come up with your own conclusion.

I recognize that there are many people writing positive articles on Edweek but you must acknowledge that Edweek also produces a lot of articles stating the contrary.  There is a very real debate currently going on across the country which should have happened before we adopted them and agreed to these reforms.  It is a travesty to the American people and our representative form of Government.

I've been told that school board members are telling citizens not to listen to us moms because we have an agenda and are a special interest group.  Please enlighten me if you know what they think our agenda is.  

My agenda is only to give my children the best education possible, guard against crony capitalism being promoted by Pearson, Microsoft and others in our state,  and stop federal over reach into our schools so that we can maintain local control. 

And because one of my local board members sent a letter out stating that citizens in our community should not read any of "those mom's blogs" and only go to the State Office for official information, I feel an obligation to share my research with as many people as I can to shed light on the other side of the debate so that citizens can make an informed decision.  

Please let your colleagues know that name calling has never been an appropriate means of discussing an issues.  

Thank you for your time, 

Alisa Ellis